Grassroots Social Networking safety implies that each member can be held accountable to theirown utterances, as well as to utterances that they forward. As Grassroots Social Networking hasno controlling entity that can be held accountable in case members of the social network breakthe law, accountability and law enforcement in Grassroots Social Networking are more similarto real life then to the social networks we are familiar with.

partnerships, networking, and revenue generation such as donations, memberships, pay what you want, and crowdfunding

He has a warehouse of notecards with ideas and stories and quotes and facts and bits of research, which get pulled and pieced together then proofread and revised and trimmed and inspected and packaged and then shipped.

Harris suggests a possible link for the weakening in stu-dents’ ability to include outside material to the testing movement that began in the 1990s,which has now encouraged a culture that rewards fast production;

The Essential Habits ofDigital Organizers

User participation in any online internet community generally follows the 90-9-1 rule:90% of community members are lurkers who read or observe, but don’t contribute9% of community members edit or respond to content but don’t create content of their own1% of community members create new content

The mere scribe and the mere compiler have disappeared (almost completely), and the mere commentator has become very rare. Each exists only insofar as any author in creating his own work cannot do without some copying, some compiling (or research), and some commenting.

That’s how blogging is complimentary to other forms of more serious work: when you’ve done enough of it, you can get entire essays, speeches, stories, novels, spontaneously appearing in a state of near-completeness, ready to be written.

Record labels are another endangered middleman. They have historically taken care of turning a song into a hit, in return for an ongoing share of revenues. But more and more artists are going it alone. More than 60,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify every day, most by bedroom-based rockstars who can use new online services to handle the logistics themselves. UnitedMasters, a music-distribution platform which bills itself as “a record label in your pocket”, recently raised $50m in a venture-capital round led by Apple. Tools like Splice make recording easier. Companies like Fanjoy take care of merchandise.And financing is getting simpler. One startup, HIFI, helps artists manage their royalties, paying them regularly and fronting them small sums to make up shortfalls. Another, Karat, extends credit to creators based on their follower count. Helped by such services independent artists took home 5.1% of global recorded music revenues last year, up from 1.7% in 2015, calculates MIDiA Research, a consultancy. In the same period the share of the three largest record labels fell from 71.1% to 65.5%.

A tyrannical few deny their writer-serfs bylines, ensuring that the value from every article accrues to the brand and not the author.

The main way to monetise online content has been advertising. Making real money requires a huge audience: even 1m views on YouTube might make the poster only about $2,000. Some types of content attract even lower ad rates. PornHub says its amateur contributors earn an average of $0.60 per 1,000 views; 1m hits would net just $600. Ads can make megastars rich, but cannot provide a living for small-time foot goddesses and other niche creators.

Yet what of those creators with more modest followings? A few online stars earn megabucks, but the tail is long (see charts). Spotify says it wants to give “a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art”. But only about 0.2% of the 7m-plus musicians on the platform make more than $50,000 a year in royalties; just 3% make more than $1,000. There are 20m gaming “experiences” on Roblox, but nearly 15% of all play takes place on one game, “Brookhaven RP”, according to analysis by Ran Mo of Electronic Arts, a game developer. On Patreon, where people can subscribe to creative services of all sorts, 200,000 creators earn a total of $1bn a year. The top earner makes around $2m, but about 98% make less than the federal minimum wage of $1,257 a month.

The share of revenue that creators can earn seems to depend on how easily they could leave. Moving one’s email list away from Substack is simple, so the firm lets writers keep 90% of their revenues. Game-makers on Roblox, who are basically stuck there, keep about 25%.

Last month Apple announced that it would let podcasters charge subscription fees, of which it would take a 30% cut for the first year, then dropping to 15%; days later Spotify followed suit—but said creators could keep the lot (from 2023 it will take 5%).

YouTube, which has long given regular video-posters a 55% cut of ad revenue, is developing new features including tips in the form of paid “applause”.

Thus, the creative freedom of creators is limited.

However, a healthy news ecosystem doesn’t just require a thriving free press, it also needs a diversity of curators, newsletters and content discovery options that enable the weird and wonderful to surface. We want to use Nuzzel as a test kitchen to see what models works for curators as well as content creators. The simple goal is a sustainable open web where the goals of creators, curators and consumers are aligned around the best possible experience.

A more compelling vision, grounded in a materialist analysis of the conditions of production, would be a world where no one needs to get paid for these contributions because their material needs are taken care of through other means.

crisis. Its “creators,”